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The Academy of American Poets is the largest membership-based nonprofit organization fostering an appreciation for contemporary poetry and supporting American poets. For over three generations, the Academy has connected millions of people to great poetry through programs such as National Poetry Month, the largest literary celebration in the world; Poets.org, the Academy’s popular website; American Poets, a biannual literary journal; and an annual series of poetry readings and special events. Since its founding, the Academy has awarded more money to poets than any other organization.

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William Stanley Merwin was born in New York City on September 30, 1927. He was raised in Union City, New Jersey and Scranton, Pennsylvania, as the son of a Presbyterian minister, and began writing hymns as a child. Merwin's mother had grown up an orphan, and later lost her brother and her first child; Merwin's father was raised in a hard and violent home. The grief from these tragedies, the inherited violence, and the surrounding poverty, run throughout Merwin's poetry, across a career that spans five decades.

Merwin attended Princeton University on a scholarship, where he was a classmate of Galway Kinnell, and studied poetry with the critic R. P. Blackmur, and his teaching assistant, John Berryman. After graduating in 1948, he spent an additional year at Princeton studying Romance language, a pursuit that would later lead to his prolific work as a translator of Latin, Spanish, and French poetry.

Merwin soon married his first wife, Dorothy Jeanne Ferry, and began writing verse plays and working as a tutor to the children of wealthy families. He traveled throughout Europe, and in 1950 took a position in Majorca, Spain as an instructor to the son of Robert Graves. While there, he met Dido Milroy, who he eventually married after ending his first marriage. His relationship with Dido became deeply influential, and helped propel him into literary circles and find work as a translator.

Merwin's first collection, A Mask for Janus (Yale University Press, 1952), was selected by W. H. Auden for the Yale Series of Younger Poets. The formal and ornate collection was praised by Auden for its technical virtuosity, and bore the influence both of Graves and the medieval poetry Merwin was translating, in its focus on classical imagery and myth.

After leaving Majorca, Merwin remained in Europe, living in London and the South of France for several years. In 1956, he received a fellowship from the Poets' Theater in Cambridge, MA, and moved back to the United States. While in Boston, he entered the circle of writers that surrounded Robert Lowell and decided to abandon his verse plays to concentrate on poetry, seeking a more American vernacular and turning inward, toward more introspective and personal subjects. At this time he also began experimenting with form and irregular metrics.

His books written during this time, Green with Beasts (Alfred A. Knopf, 1956) and The Drunk in the Furnace (Macmillan, 1960), both demonstrate the beginning of a significant shift in style and perspective, which intensified in his later work. A New York Times review of The Drunk in the Furnace noted "the earthiness, the grittiness, the humane immediacy that informs the finest of these poems."

Merwin and Dido soon moved back to Europe, and lived in London and the South of France. They became close friends with Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, and witnessed the brutal collapse of their marriage and Plath's eventual suicide. In 1968, Merwin and Dido separated, and he began living for part of the year in New York.

In 1967, Merwin published the critically acclaimed volume, The Lice (Atheneum, 1967), followed by The Carrier of Ladders (Atheneum) in 1970, both of which remain his most influential collections. Both books use classical legends as a means to explore personal and political themes, including his opposition to the Vietnam War. In 1971, Merwin received the Pulitzer Prize for The Carrier of Ladders. In a letter to the New York Review of Books, he declared his intention to donate the $1000 prize to antiwar causes as protest, because of his objection to the war. Auden responded through his own letter that the Pulitzer judges were not a political party and had no ties to American foreign policy.

In 1976, Merwin moved to Hawaii to study with the Zen Buddhist master Robert Aitken. There he married Paula Schwartz in a Buddhist ceremony in 1983. Merwin settled in Maui, in a home that he helped design and build, surrounded by acres of tropical forest which he painstakingly restored after the land had been devastated and depleted after years of erosion, logging, and agriculture. The rigorous practice of Buddhism and passionate dedication to environmentalism that Merwin devoted himself to in Hawaii has profoundly influenced his later work, including his evocative renderings of the natural world in The Compass Flower (Atheneum, 1977), Opening the Hand (Atheneum, 1983), and The Rain in the Trees (Alfred A. Knopf, 1988), as well as The Folding Cliffs (Alfred A. Knopf, 1998), a novel-in-verse drawing on the history and legends of Hawaii.

Over the course of his long career, Merwin has published over twenty books of poetry. His recent collections include The Moon Before Morning (Copper Canyon Press, 2014); The Shadow of Sirius (Copper Canyon Press, 2008), which won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize; Present Company (Copper Canyon Press, 2007); Migration: New & Selected Poems (Copper Canyon Press, 2005), which won the 2005 National Book Award; The Pupil (Alfred A. Knopf, 2001); The River Sound (Alfred A. Knopf, 1999), which was named a New York Times Notable Book of the Year; Flower and Hand: Poems 1977-1983 (Copper Canyon Press, 1997); The Vixen (Alfred A. Knopf, 1996); and Travels (Alfred A. Knopf, 1993), which received the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize.

He has also published nearly twenty books of translation, including Collected Haiku of Yosa Buson (Copper Canyon Press, 2013), with Takako Lento; Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (Alfred A. Knopf, 2004); Dante's Purgatorio (Alfred A. Knopf, 2000); and volumes by Federico García Lorca and Pablo Neruda. His numerous plays and books of prose include Unchopping a Tree (Trinity University Press, 2014); The Book of Fables (Copper Canyon Press, 2007), a collection of his short prose; Summer Doorways (Counterpoint, 2006), a memoir of his childhood; and The Lost Upland (Alfred A. Knopf, 1992), his memoir of life in the south of France.

W. S. Merwin’s art is ravenous, and this award celebrates that hunger. To translate is to inhabit another voice, which in turn enlarges one’s horizons as a writer; and Merwin’s huge Selected Translations represents a lifetime spent doing just that: feeding his own art with other voices. The book is a museum of world poetry, collecting artifacts from a vast range of cultures and times. This year, in addition to the Selected Translations, Merwin also published a voluminous translation from one of Japan’s greatest classical poets, a major addition to his world-poetry museum: Collected Haiku of Yosa Buson. And so continues Merwin’s lifelong gift to our hunger for other voices.

His other honors include the Academy of American Poets Fellowship, the Aiken Taylor Award for Modern American Poetry, the Bollingen Prize, the Governor’s Award for Literature of the State of Hawaii, the Lannan Literary Award for Lifetime Achievement, the Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Writers’ Award, the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets, the PEN Translation Prize, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the Shelley Memorial Award, the Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets, and the Zbigniew Herbert International Literary Award, as well as fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Rockefeller Foundation.

He is a former Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and has served as Poetry Consultant to the Library of Congress. He served as Poet Laureate of the United States from 2010 to 2011. He currently lives and works in Hawaii.

Variation on a Theme

W. S. Merwin, 1927

Thank you my life long afternoonlate in this spring that has no agemy window above the riverfor the woman you led me towhen it was time at last the wordscoming to me out of mid-airthat carried me through the clear dayand come even now to find mefor old friends and echoes of themthose mistakes only I could makehomesickness that guides the ploversfrom somewhere they had loved beforethey knew they loved it to somewherethey had loved before they saw itthank you good body hand and eyeand the places and moments knownonly to me revisitingonce more complete just as they areand the morning stars I have seenand the dogs who are guiding me

W. S. Merwin

by this poet

If I had not met the red-haired boy whose father
had broken a leg parachuting into Provence
to join the resistance in the final stage of the war
and so had been killed there as the Germans were moving north
out of Italy and if the friend who was with him
as he was

Certain words now in our knowledge we will not use again, and we will never forget them. We need them. Like the back of the picture. Like our marrow, and the color in our veins. We shine the lantern of our sleep on them, to make sure, and there they are, trembling already for the day of witness. They will be buried